Salting in Blowfish Cipher is a technique used to enhance security. It involves adding random data, the ‘salt’, into the password before hashing. This prevents attacks using precomputed tables of hash values (rainbow tables) by making each user’s hashed password unique, even if they share the same plaintext password.
The salt value is stored alongside the hashed password and is not secret. Its purpose is to ensure that identical passwords have different hashes, thwarting attackers who use rainbow tables or dictionary attacks.
In cryptography, salting significantly increases the complexity and computational resources required for an attacker to crack a cipher. By forcing an attacker to compute a separate rainbow table for each possible salt, it makes such attacks impractical due to the time and storage requirements. However, it does not prevent brute force or guessing attacks, so strong, complex passwords are still essential.
